As officials from Rogers Media and the NHL prepared to address the media on the details of the
12-year, $5.2 billion broadcast
deal Tuesday morning, Sportsnet Hockey analyst Darren Millard strode to the dais wearing a gray suit and a wide grin.

After wishing everyone a good morning, Millard told the crowd how excited he was “to hang out for the next 12 years.”

Laughter rippled through the room.

But Rogers’ new contract with the NHL isn’t funny to TSN.

The deal figures to cause a seismic shift in Canada’s sports media landscape and hand Rogers and its Sportsnet family of networks a massive advantage in their ongoing competition with Bell-owned TSN. While the country’s first all-sports network still bills itself as Canada’s Sports Leader, experts wonder how TSN can maintain that position without comprehensive rights to the pro sports league most popular here.

“(TSN president) Phil King is a smart person, he’ll find programming,” says Brian Cooper, president of the S&E Sponsorship Group, a firm that helps match corporate sponsors and sports properties. “They’re going to have to be very strategic as to what they build. Do they go out and grab something to build? They’re going to have to do that concurrently with expanding the existing rights they already have.”

This season, TSN will broadcast 147 regular-season NHL games, including 72 involving Canadian teams. But next year they’ll be limited to regional broadcasts games involving the Leafs, Montreal Canadiens and Winnipeg Jets and Ottawa Senators.

Tuesday afternoon the company released a statement pointing to those games, as well as its broadcast rights to national team competitions, as proof of its continued to commitment to hockey.

“We submitted a bid we believed was valuable for the NHL and appropriate for our business, but were ultimately outbid,” the statement read. “With an on-air broadcast team unmatched in terms of talent and experience and our extensive array of pro sports content, we’re committed to TSN remaining Canada’s Sports Leader.”

Exactly how TSN will accomplish that goal isn’t clear, and company officials weren’t elaborating Tuesday. But the network does have experience surviving without large doses of programming it once called its own.

In 2011 Bell, which owns TSN, joined CBC to bid for the broadcast rights to the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, and the 2016 games in Rio, Brazil.

But by the following year, the joint bid had dissolved and CBC was awarded sole rights in August 2012

The network has also lost NHL programming before. Sportsnet held national NHL rights from the 1998-1999 season through 2001-2002, leaving TSN a secondary provider.

TSN has a strong track record of developing sports properties into strong national brands. Under TSN’s direction, the world junior hockey championship has developed into Canada’s equivalent of the NCAA’s March Madness — the highest-profile, highest-stakes competition for the best amateurs in the sport.

The network has also been the exclusive broadcaster of CFL games since 2008, building that league into a powerful television franchise. Last year’s Grey Cup drew 5.8 million viewers, and this season’s Western final was the country’s most-viewed sports event two weekends ago,
outranking Hockey Night in Canada
.

But making up for the loss of mid-week NHL games every winter will present a tougher challenge, experts say.

Cooper sees basketball as a largely untapped resource, but points out that one Canadian NBA team — the Raptors — can’t attract the same audience seven Canadian NHL teams can.

York University sports marketing lecturer Vijay Setlur says the NHL’s absence might mean more airtime for Major League Soccer or several winter Olympic sports, but he recognizes the size of the programming gap TSN will have to fill.

“You can only have so many darts and poker,” says Setlur, who teaches at the Schulich School of Business. “If I was one of these lesser profile properties I would call TSN right away and say ‘how can we help you fill your void?’ ”

And while TSN pledges to provide strong NHL analysis, Cooper says even impeccable beyond-the-rink features can’t compete with live games for fans’ attention.

Or, more importantly, for advertising dollars.

“Live sports is the only thing that’s not being PVR’d, and that’s why people pay so much for it,” he says. “For my clients, it’s going to be a major shift. TSN always had had national hockey programming, or they could go to (CBC). Now they can go to one spot.”

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